I know, I know, you’ve heard them all before. All those home remedies for hiccups. Hold your breath. Drink an entire glass of water. Eat a spoonful of sugar. Breathe into a paper bag. Get someone to scare you. None of that really works. Well, maybe once in a while, but not consistently. There is […]
I was sitting at a table in my elementary school library when a friend said, “This is just a dream.” He was right. I woke up to a dark and quiet house, and a new power — it was possible to recognize dreams from the inside. Every morning, I searched my memory for clues. It […]
There’s this scene — you might know it — from Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy, when Larry Hubbard requests a table for one and receives a spotlit escort to his one-top. It’s a funny gag, but of course it works because it tweaks folks’ paranoia about public solitude. Just search “eating alone,” you’ll find a […]
I can’t remember now where I got the horse tooth. But where does a boy get any of the junk he collects? I remember I had a winter coat, the kind I called a caterpillar coat. Had a red bike reflector in the pocket for quite a while. A couple of little stones that struck […]
I was driving to a poker game with a friend who’d come in from Colorado, and we were just outside of the town we both grew up in. It’s Georgia piedmont, good for deer hunting, in fact I used to have a barber down in Florida who went up there every season, just coincidentally. The […]